Rehabilitation following severe neurological trauma, such as spinal cord injury or stroke, is difficult, but has been shown to provide useful results. Conventionally, physical therapy methods are used for such rehabilitation. However, these methods are labor intensive, often requiring one or more therapists to work with each patient. Conventional physical therapy methods include repetitive movement of a patient's limb or body part, with therapist assistance, in an attempt to strengthen muscles and improve lost muscle control associated with the limb or body part. This type of therapy is most often performed in a hospital. When the patient can effectively move the limb or body part so as to be able to care for themselves the patient may be discharged from the hospital.
Robot aided therapies have been developed as a way of cutting labor costs associated with rehabilitation. Conventional robot-aided therapy includes repetitive movement of a patient's limb or body part by means of a separate robot arm or the like, in much the same way that a physical therapist would move the patient's limb during conventional manual physical therapy. It has been shown that patients treated daily with additional robot-aided therapy during rehabilitation have improved motor activity at hospital discharge. There is evidence that improved recovery can result from more therapy, earlier therapy, and therapies that incorporate highly repetitive movement training. However, current robotic devices and therapies require the use of relatively large and expensive robots, practically suitable only for inpatient services at hospitals. Although the total labor cost may be reduced with robotic therapies, the therapy is still performed while the patient is an inpatient, still resulting in a relatively high cost.
With both robotic and manual therapies, a patient's progression thorough the therapy is essentially the same, i.e., they are subjected to a period of “rehabilitation” before being able to accomplish activities of daily living. The patient subjected to these therapies is generally not able to quickly return to normal activities outside of the inpatient environment.
For example, following an incomplete C4 (fourth cervical vertebrae) level spinal cord injury, a resulting symptom is almost complete loss of biceps muscle strength. Initial stages of rehabilitation simply involve the patient lifting their arm, in a repetitive fashion, with the assistance of a physical therapist. Once the patient has progressed far enough to lift their arm themselves, they can re-learn how to feed and care for themselves. A conventional robot-aided therapy merely provides the same repetitive lifting of the arm, but with a robot and without the therapist. Still, the patient must progress far enough to lift their arm themselves before leaving the hospital.
It will be appreciated that the patients described above have not lost a limb. Rather, the patients have lost strength in one or more limbs or body parts. Other types of injury, for which a patient has lost limb, are treated with prosthetic devices which replace the lost limb.